Next year will see Taiwan take delivery of some big-ticket US weapons – including more M1A2T Abrams tanks and MQ-9B SkyGuardian drones – from a nearly US$22 billion long-delayed package of arms sales.
The shipments will mark the highest annual volume of arms arrivals in years, significantly strengthening Taiwan’s deterrence and war-fighting capacity amid mounting threats from Beijing, according to two reports recently submitted to the legislature by the island’s defence ministry.
One report on US arms sales progress shows that Taiwan faced a backlog of US$21.54 billion across 18 active arms orders, some of which had yet to arrive. Of these, 15 were on schedule, two were delayed and one was ahead of schedule. Nearly US$4.5 billion worth of systems were in the process of being delivered.
The longest delay is for the AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapon, a guided glide bomb delivery that Congress was first notified about in 2017. Initially due to arrive on the island in 2023, production and testing bottlenecks have pushed delivery back to 2026. This stretches the gap from approval to arrival to nine years, despite Taiwan purchasing only around 50 bombs.
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The F-16V Block 70 fighter programme is also late. The first aircraft rolled off the assembly line in March, more than a year late, but the ministry has insisted all 66 jets will arrive before the end of 2026.
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